After a lot of research, everything I found on adding date range searching to a CGridView advanced search form seemed to involve adding two new public variables (e.g. $date_from, $date_to), 'safe' rules for the new variables, and a rather chunky if/elseif/else check in the search() method. This probably isn't a hassle for most, but because many of the tables in my database contain two or three and sometimes four date columns (e.g. date_created, date_modified, date_deleted etc.), it meant I was having to add up to eight public variables, the corresponding safe rules, and modifying the search() criteria for each date attribute. So, I set about creating a better way and I thought I'd share my work with the community.

Backoffice Grid Views often list information like Posts for a blog while showing at the same time linked information like the User who wrote that post.
For more efficiency, it is appropriate that the User is displayed as a link to the User detail page.

The article Fixing extensions without modifying their code reminded me of another patching technique that I used. My conviction and a hard look on the web had led me to an article Redefine PHP class methods or class giving me a head start to do what I wanted: patching third party code without touching the original to allow easy upgrades.

If you're working a lot with extensions you often stumble upon problems, when you want to include them into your custom web application, like hardcoded or absolute path aliases or classes extended from core application components, which implement addiditonal features.